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Indonesia's election authority has banned President Megawati Soekarnoputri from holding outdoor rallies in Denpasar in her political heartland of Bali in a further blow to her efforts to win next month's election.

A member of the Bali branch of the election authority, I Gusti Putu Artah, said Ms Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), had broken the country's tight rules on campaigning by having state employees attend a rally in Denpasar on June 11.

He said the PDI-P had now been banned from holding any further open-air rallies in Denpasar until the end of campaigning on July 2, three days before the country's first direct presidential election.

Although the ban applies only to outdoor rallies in Bali's capital, and will have little impact on her schedule, the nationwide publicity that has accompanied the first ban on one of the five candidates has stung her campaign team.

"We are very disturbed," said Gayus Lumbuun, the head of the PDI-P's campaign legal team. He said the ban was "baseless" and would damage the PDI-P's image in the eyes of voters.

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PDI-P officials said yesterday they planned to appeal to the national election authority in Jakarta as well as the Bali branch.

But Mr Gusti did not resile from the decision to impose the ban and said it was to set an example to all candidates and to show the public the law would be enforced. "We want to uphold the law ... No matter who he is, a regent or the No. 1 person in Indonesia, we don't care," he said.

Although the regulation provides for a ban across the island, Mr Gusti said the fallout from extending it beyond Denpasar might have been "too big".

"The people here are fanatical PDI-P supporters," he said.

All aspects of campaigning in the presidential election are tightly regulated, and the first fortnight of the campaign has passed relatively smoothly.

The law bans questioning of the nation's ideology, Pancasila, or the preamble to the 1945 constitution, and forbids insults against "any person, religion, ethnicity, race, social group, other candidates and/or pairs of candidates".

Debates between candidates have so far been free of the barbs common in Western political campaigns, and parties have refrained from openly running negative campaigns.

However, the two former generals contesting the poll, Wiranto and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, have complained of smear campaigns against them in recent days.